'Babies' movie review: Bundles of joy, the world over

Focus FeaturesBayarjargal, who lives in Mongolia with his family, is one of four babies followed from birth to first steps in Thomas Balmes' BABIES, a Focus Features release. All happy babies are alike.

But — to continue misquoting Tolstoy — all unhappy babies are alike, too.

They want milk. They want burping. They want to be rocked faster. They want to be rocked slower. They basically want whatever it is they don’t have, and they want it now.

Funny how little we change.

Babies

(PG) Focus (79 min.)

Directed by Thomas Balmes. In English, Japanese, Himba and Mongolian, without subtitles. Now playing in New York.

Stephen Whitty's rating: Two and a half stars

Rating note: The film contains lots of breastfeeding and diaper changing.

“Babies,” an odd new documentary, drives home its point about the universality of experience by, literally, spanning the globe. And detailing a year in the life of babies in Africa, in Mongolia, in Tokyo and in San Francisco.

And the similarities are striking.

It doesn’t matter, it seems, whether you’re growing up in a yurt on the Asian steppes or a small apartment in Japan. If you fall down, you will carry on melodramatically until someone picks you up. If you have an older sibling, he will torture you, just for the hell of it.

And whether your domestic animals are cats, dogs, chickens or cows, they will — bless them — somehow make allowances for your vulnerability, and stupidity, and put up with all kinds of infantile nonsense.

The differences are striking, too, particularly between the first world and the third, where apparently helicopter parents have yet to land. (The Mongolian version of a playpen? A rope, with one end tied around the baby’s waist, and the other looped around a bedpost.)

These are some of the insights of “Babies” — but finding them requires wading through an awful lot of clutter and confusion.

All of that is the movie’s fault, too. It provides no information beyond place names, and no narration. It doesn’t even provide subtitles (which — given the world’s lagging fluency in Japanese, let alone Mongolian and Himba — reduces most of the people to voiceless ciphers).

It’s particularly frustrating once we move outside of the urban (and overprivileged) environments of Tokyo and San Francisco. Are these Mongols a true family of nomads? What’s the social structure in this Namibian tribe, and why do we never see any men?

Beats me.

Even with its abbreviated length, “Babies” can drag a bit, as well; there are long stretches when the photography isn’t much more exciting than a nanny-snooping security cam. And the lack of subtitles immediately marginalizes many of the subjects.